ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Olympic legacies by focusing on the mundane, banal and ‘everyday’. It aims to demonstrate that the way this Olympic legacy is consumed ought to encourage us to recontextualize relationships between the Olympic Games, themselves and the cultivation of sporting communities and athletic/sporting identity. Cultural theorist Victor Burgin suggests that Henri Lefebvre’s discourse of human space and everyday life provides a problematic of space theory that is, at least, adequate as a point of departure for the analysis of identity, humanness and representation. Since the late 1950s, Calgarians have conceived of and represented their Olympic speed skating oval in many different forms. Like many grand projects, the Olympic Oval has a considerable pre-history that began in 1959 when the Calgary Olympic Development Corporation first bid for the right to host the 1964 Olympic Winter Games. Among the different user groups that the Oval supports, speed skaters have a strategic advantage at this Olympic legacy facility.
